


A Little Destruction

by Gvoz



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Slow Burn, The season four we deserved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25706587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gvoz/pseuds/Gvoz
Summary: Stiles is supposed to be the normal one of the group. The human glue holding together all their supernatural differences. But something has been off with him since the Nogitsune, like the pieces that make him up no longer fit quite right. The grate against each other, leave gaps, cracks and seams. Rips where things might crawl their way in. Or out.A new big bad has strolled into town, one that cares little for Stiles and his growing mountain of issues. She's a collector. A purveyor of the strange, powerful, rare. And she brings with her an army of supernatural creatures they can't even begin to prepare themselves for.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	1. On The 8th Of April

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this before but pulled it around some pretty heavy writer's block and some personal bullshit. I've made a few edits, nothing too big so if you've read this before and want to skip ahead you won't be missing out on anything too big. Otherwise I'm going to try and update this once a week. I always make a note of possible triggers in the bottom notes for anyone who wants a heads up on that too.
> 
> Set after 3b, this is the Stiles-centric season 4 we deserved y'all.

“I guess humans like to watch a little destruction.

Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin.

Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”

\- Markus Zusak

When Claudia and Noah Stilinski welcome their little boy into the world on the 8th of April it is a bright and sunny day in Beacon Hills.

Claudia lies in a tiny hospital cot, her husband sitting beside her, holding her hand and pushing sweat-soaked hair off her forehead as she weeps. A screen of blue plastic shields her from the view of her stomach, her swollen belly opened up by incisions and her son pulled from her womb with cold, methodical hands.

She is crying, sobbing violently as she holds onto Noah’s hand. He presses his lips to her temple, tells her she’s doing so well. So, so well.

When Claudia and Noah Stilinski welcome their little boy into the world he is only 24 weeks along. He weighs a meagre 1 pound and he cannot breathe on his own.

Mieczysław Stilinski is the only child of three attempts to survive, and even then the doctors cast doubt on whether or not he will live past his infancy. He is too small; perhaps nine and a half inches from head to toe if he’s lucky, fitting neatly into Noah’s cupped hands. The deputy is huddled in close beside his wife, the pair watching as their baby boy struggles through his first moments of life.

If he dies he will not be the first child they have lost, but he will be their last.

When Noah Stilinski first meets Claudia he is a young and naive 21 years old. She is three years younger than him, still in school and living with her parents and every bit as out of his reach as she could possibly be. He meets her at a house party, invited along by his roommate for free alcohol and a much needed break from the stresses of university.

Claudia is 18 and she is a genius. She is witty and sarcastic and can talk circles around the star struck Noah in a way that somehow manages to both annoy and endear him in equal measure. She always seems to have the upper hand in their conversations, even when they are talking about something entirely mundane. Her grades are perfect; she’s on the lacrosse team and plays piano in the school orchestra. She is beautiful in a way that is simple; deep brown eyes and hair to match. Fair, porcelain skin with just the barest hint of freckles on her nose and cheeks. A subtle presence, but strong and commanding when she wanted to be. When she needed to be.

The first time they meet she smiles at him from across the room, all gentle teeth and deep set dimples and wide Bambi brown eyes, and he knows he is done for.

They are both still children in so many ways when they fall in love, with so many dreams and false expectations about life, about the future. Noah wants a big family, to groom himself into a good man (better than his father), a lawyer in a big city far away from Beacon Hills where he can ‘make it big’ and move on from his small town life. Claudia wants to become a concert pianist, wants to sit up on a stage and play for the world to hear her. She does not want children, does not crave a family the way Noah does. His search for stability impeding on her own need for fun and freedom.

Looking in on their relationship objectively the two were not made for each other. So opposing were their personalities and ideals. Noah filled to the brim with discipline, so gentle and quiet in nature. He struggled to keep up with Claudia, with her boundless energy and inability to keep still for any period of time. Chasing one dream and then another, no plan ever really seen through to completion before her attention is grabbed by something new. It should never have worked.

But somehow it had.

And Claudia is very suddenly and very surprisingly in love for only the second time in her life. She falls fast and hard for the Bachelor of Arts student with bad grades and big ideas. His dusty green eyes and old-fashioned sense of justice and his addiction to reality TV and baseball. The way he puts too much salt on his food and won’t eat the crusts on his sandwiches even when she berates him for being a child. The way he looks at her as if she holds all the answers he could ever need and the way he touches her as if she were made of gold and steel. Strong and precious all at once.

As soon as Claudia graduates from high school the pair file for marriage. Noah’s father is estranged, the two not having spoken since his own high school graduation (an event the man did not attend), so he invites his roommate and long-standing best friend to the small ceremony to stand witness beside Claudia’s parents. They are married in the hallway of a courthouse building by a clerk whose hands shake with withdrawal and has to pause periodically to correct the accompanying stutter. Claudia wears a white beach dress, no money for a proper wedding gown, and Noah wears his newly issued naval uniform. It’s nothing fancy, no big ceremony, but they are happy and they are married.

They exchange vows neither of them worked very hard on and smile for unprofessional photos and dance in the living room of Noah’s apartment. Simple gold wedding bands that had once belonged to Claudia’s grandparents adorning their fingers, faux-diamonds shimmering in the dimmed lights but failing to tear their attention away from each other.

Not even a month later Noah finishes his degree and moves to the coast to serve out his tour. He holds a gun for the first time in his life and something about the weight of it in his hand shifts his perception of the world just a little.

He learns very quickly that gun fights in real life aren’t quite as spectacular as the ones he sees in movies.

And just like that four years pass them by.

They buy a house, the bills only slightly less overwhelming with the support money Noah receives for his time in the navy. It’s tiny. One storey that feels barely big enough for just the two of them. It takes them a month to fully move in, sparse furniture and rooms with very little personality. The back windows are barred, there is no garden and the view from the front window reveals the rear end bricks of a struggling video rental store.

It’s theirs.

It’s perfect.

Noah’s training and commitment to his position as a naval officer teaches him he doesn’t have the right kind of focus for law, but his sense of righteousness never disappears, and he knows that even without becoming a lawyer he wants to be involved in the justice system. As his service comes to an end he applies for a trainee-ship at the Beacon County Sheriff Station.

It takes three applications and an inside vote of confidence before he makes it in, but he does make it.

And so Noah’s dreams change, adjusting to his life and decisions. Gone is the young man dreaming of becoming a lawyer in a far off city, now he stands proud in a pale green deputy’s uniform. 25, married and still so full of optimism for the future.

Claudia’s dreams also change. She injures her hand at some point during their years together and her dreams of playing piano professionally are dashed from right in front of her. She does not mourn for long though, doesn’t seem to have the time when her life married to Noah is just so full of adventure. They have very little money but they travel when they can, jumping from state to state in a strange cross country trek with no particular course or structure. A whim is enough to have them packing their bags and driving for hours on end seeking out the adventure Claudia craves so much.

It’s fun and exciting and so much more than Claudia’s dreams amounted to in high school. So, so much more.

So when Noah comes home one afternoon celebrating his new desk position in the Sheriff’s station and she tells him she’s pregnant neither of them thinks to worry. They’re lives are going so well. They’re so happy.

They prepare for their tiny house to get even tinier. Noah has to clear out his study so they can convert it into the baby’s room. There’s a lot of fighting about nothing. Noah wants carpet in the baby room, Claudia wants polished wood. Noah wants soft yellow walls, Claudia wants blue or pink or green (depending on what time of day you ask her). Noah likes the name Charlie for a boy and Kate for a girl, Claudia likes Percy and Madeleine.

In the end there is compromise. The floors are hardwood and the walls of the baby room are a sunny yellow, a colour that stains Noah’s hands and clothes and hair for days after he’s finished painting. If the baby is a boy they will name him Charlie, a girl, Madeleine. They buy a cot and a stroller and a chest filled with baby’s toys. Noah gets ahead of himself a little and buys a brand new bookshelf filled with picture books. He also goes out and splurges on rattles and dummies and tiny clothes with stupid and adorable slogans on them, a mobile and a baby monitor, enough blankets to suffocate the kid in, picture frames and night lights and a rug for the floor and a million other things well outside their budget.

Claudia laughs at him for his enthusiasm, but she kisses him senseless and listens raptly to all of his ramblings about their new life with their new baby.

At seven weeks along Claudia goes in for her first ultrasound. It's uncomfortable and invasive and Noah's pacing does absolutely nothing for her nerves.

"I'm going to ask you to relax," Dr. Hillard tells her in that distant, methodical voice she's always hated hearing from doctors, "Because you're seven weeks along your baby should measure about half an inch from head to toe. Which sounds small but they'll grow bigger. We might even hear a heartbeat."

"A heartbeat?" Noah jumps in, taking a seat beside his wife when he can no longer take her glaring at his pacing, clasping one of her hands in his, "Already?"

"If we're lucky," the doctor tells them, "Typically speaking the heartbeat can be heard as early as six weeks. But there are a lot of factors involved in whether or not we can actually detect one at this point, and even later into the pregnancy it may be hard to pick up on."

The textbook answer makes Claudia want to groan in annoyance; the only thing that stops her is the comforting weight of her husband's grip and the grainy images on the screen beside her. Flickering and shifting slightly as the couple wait with bated breath. It takes only a few moments but it feels like an eternity before the tiny white lump appears on screen and Dr. Hillard smiles, leaning over to point at the miniscule shape.

"There's your baby," she says, her voice softening just slightly to deliver the news, shifting the wand to a new angle before a tiny thudding can be heard, "And there's the heartbeat."

"Noah! Noah!" Claudia shouts unnecessarily, gripping his hand tighter and shaking it slightly as if his attention weren't already glued to the screen as well, "That's our baby! We're having a baby!"

And Noah, for his part, just laughs alongside his wife's excited cheers. Grateful that neither she nor Dr. Hillard comment on the wet sound of it, strangled in his chest with the effort to keep his eyes dry.

The rest of the appointment runs smoothly. Their baby is healthy, is growing normally, and when the doctor prescribes Claudia pregnancy vitamins she only gets a little angry at the way she lectures her on their proper dosage. The car ride home is filled with Claudia's voice bouncing off the soft felt interior, talking about all the wonderful opportunities their baby will bring them. About what a great father Noah will be.

That night they lie wrapped up in each other. Noah has his head pressed into the dip in Claudia’s shoulder, listening to her talk and talk and talk while she cards her fingers through his hair. He presses a gentle kiss to her jaw part ways through her ramblings and she makes a joke about how he only ever acts so sweet when he wants her to shut up.

“For someone who told me, and I’m quoting you here, that she ‘never, ever, ever, ever’ wanted to have children you’re awfully excited,” he says, more to the ceiling than to his wife.

Claudia huffs, the contracting of her chest stirs Noah to prop himself up on an elbow, watching her as she speaks, “That was then. This is now.”

He raises an eyebrow, “What changed?”

She grins, dipping in for a kiss, deep brown eyes locked with the deputy’s pale green ones, trapping him, “You,” she whispers gently.

And Noah can’t help but smile at that. Because the way he loves is all-encompassing and unbreakable and forever. He cannot love without throwing all of himself into the feeling, without committing every piece of his being to the few people really deserving of his passion. He doesn’t believe in having a ‘one true love’, but if he did, Claudia would be his.

His wife does not love the same way. She is not so passionate, but she is loyal and she is fierce. Her unruly personality and the way she throws herself into her actions more than making up for her more gentle form of love. A good balance for Noah’s quieter character and bruising devotion.

They fall asleep soon after that, tangled up in each other’s limbs and the sheets. Whispering affection, breath ghosting across their skin with how closely they lie together.

Two weeks later Claudia wakes to a burning in her gut and blood between her legs. For a moment she just sits up in bed, looking at the red staining her sheets and coating her thighs. She smears her fingers through it in confusion, watching it cling to her skin like gloves.

A rattling down the hallway draws her from her thoughts just enough that she finds her voice, that the significance of what’s happening begins to hit her, like a fist to the chest and a vice around her throat. Like her breath is being forced out of her lungs and held back by her teeth all at once.

She screams, calls for her husband. Her hands shake and she wraps them around her stomach, as if the action of it might save the child she already knows she has lost. Noah drops whatever it was he’d been doing, the sounds of breaking glass preceding his footsteps, sprinting through the house to get to his wife’s side. He’s saying something to her. Soft, soothing words that fall on deaf ears as she sits. Shell-shocked. A puppet in his hands as he guides her out to the car, driving them to the hospital with a gentle hand on her still bloodied thigh. Words continue to pour from his lips, gentle and quiet and reassuring for all that Claudia does not hear them. Gaze cast downward as if she might see where her child rests inside her.

Madeleine Stilinski dies before she is even born.

She is small and inhuman, a heartbreaking one inch when she finally falls from between Claudia’s legs. A lumpy mess of blood with barely formed fingers jutting out from the stumps of her arms, the hilltops of her spine jagged along her back.

She is not technically a girl. The miscarriage occurred before her sex organs have fully formed, but a grief counsellor tells them that naming the baby may help them cope. So ‘it’ becomes ‘Madeleine’, and they bury her in the Stilinski family plot beside Noah’s mother.

Their tiny house is silent after that. Claudia does not talk and Noah does not make her. Her parents come by often, offering support and meals when neither of them can seem to pick themselves up from the couch or the bed or the floor. Watch quietly as Noah will talk to their daughter, care for her as she slowly pieces herself together even though he is struggling too.

Both of them are falling apart.

It takes a long time for things to feel normal again. Over a year and in all that time neither of them has set foot in the nursery they had so lovingly prepared. Claudia spends most of her time in the living room, propped up in her armchair as she stares out the window. Sometimes Noah will sit with her, other times he disappears elsewhere in the house for hours on end. And for all the space is so small it feels overwhelmingly large now. Like they could get lost wandering their own hallways.

Eventually Noah goes back to work; he cannot avoid it any longer. He showers for the first time in days, shaves for the first time in weeks. Pushing himself back into routine. Claudia tries to do the same; she asks her parents if they can move the old piano into the house. They agree almost too quickly and their sympathy makes her feel sick. She is not a woman to be pitied, even in the throes of her grief.

So she launches herself into what people expect. They’re expecting the same Claudia Stilinski who broke a boy’s finger in her senior year when he harassed a freshman. The same Claudia who publically berated the Sheriff for treating her husband unfairly at work. They’re expecting her to bounce back and cope and handle this as fiercely as she has any dilemma.

She starts leaving the house more, buys plants she can hardly care for and picks up work at a coffee shop further in town. She’s pleasant and restless and witty the way she was before the baby. Before the loss. She throws herself into this façade, this need to be okay even if only to stop the questions and the looks and the gentle, horrid hands on her shoulder as people give her their condolences. Life goes back to normal and Claudia Stilinski is herself again.

It takes a year and a half more for Noah to suggest having another baby. The question of it startles her, the absurdity of it all.

“Is it really so strange I want to try for another kid? For a family?” Noah asks. A family had always been his dream.

“We have a family,” she bites, swallowing hard around the bitterness in her throat, “You and me. That’s a family. We’re a family.”

“Clauds,” his words are gentle, his hands on her shoulders a comfort she didn’t ask for.

“Stop this Noah! We can’t! I can’t! We tried and it didn’t work and it might not work again and I can’t!” she screams, shoving him away. It is the first time she has really let the grief consume her like this. Let it take hold and shape her emotions, sadness turning to sharpened anger as she hurls it at her husband.

She expects him to be angry in return. Expects him to fight back, yell at her, something.

He pulls her into his arms. She goes willingly, lax in his grip as the anger cools into what it has always been. Loss. She has lost a child. No one had ever prepared her for this, the heartbreak and the pain. No one could have.

“It’s okay,” Noah says, his voice raw and she realises he’s crying too. Quiet and meek under the onslaught of her deep sobbing. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. This isn’t your fault.”

Things really do settle after that. Claudia stops trying to bottle up her guilt and grief. She cries more in that year than she thinks she has in all the accumulative years of her life so far. In some ways this tragedy brings the two of them closer. They’re not children anymore, and their ideals of a perfect future have been battered and bruised. A lot of their time is spent wrapped up in each other. Claudia begins to play piano again, gives lessons from home when she can.

Time passes and Noah does not mention trying for another child. He leaves the decision up to Claudia, it is her body. And he may have lost a child, may yearn for one of his own, but he will not push this on her.

He knows too much about having parents who hate each other and who hate their children.

All at once he is 30. Life is good again; he can feel the way his smile fits easily across his face now, soft where it had once been rough with force. He and Claudia stand over the tiny plaque with Madeleine’s name on it, a bouquet in hand. Her fingers are curled gently around his arm where they’re pressed together. This is easier now. Not easy, it never will be, but better. They can talk about what might have been and afford each other the liberty to smile.

“You would have been an amazing father,” Claudia tells him, pressing a kiss to his forearm where it rests around her shoulders, “Maybe- I think maybe we could try again.”

A pause. “We don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

So they try. They open up the old baby room; give it a new coat of paint. Green this time. A new colour for a new baby. They go through all the same motions. Unpack all the boxes of books and toys. Noah spends a little under an hour reassembling the crib.

There are new names too. This time Noah chooses a girl’s name and Claudia a boy’s.

Sophie and Damian.

There are a lot more doctor’s appointments this time around. A lot of vitamins and pregnancy drugs, a security blanket of pills and yoga and whatever else they’re recommended. Anything to make sure this baby is safe.

Noah and Claudia watch as slowly all their friends follow suit in expanding their little families. It feels like everyone is building homes on solid foundations and they are building theirs on worry and fear.

Madeleine took all of their hope with her.

When they pass the nine week mark they breathe a sigh of relief. There is no blood; the ultrasound shows everything is fine. They don’t hear a heartbeat, which doesn’t worry them as much as it might other parents. They’re almost glad they can’t hear it. They’ve heard a heartbeat before and they know it means nothing.

At twenty weeks Claudia feels the child move for the first time. She is visiting Noah at work, sitting up on his desk as she picks through a large helping of baked potatoes. She never had many cravings in her first pregnancy, but she does now. And all she wants all the time is potatoes. Baked potatoes, fried potatoes, mash potatoes.

It’s driving Noah crazy.

So today she brought him Chinese, a special treat. They’re sitting there together during his lunchbreak when she feels something in her belly. It’s large enough now that she can rest her hand on the bump of it, an action she often draws comfort from. There’s a fluttering, the kind of feeling you get when you’re nervous or anxious. Like butterflies or a rumbling.

She puts down her food, presses her hands to her stomach. And there it is. A tiny shift under the skin, barely there at all.

The noise she makes then is something between a squawk and a scream. Noah’s immediate thought is that something is wrong. With Claudia or the baby or-

“The baby’s moving!” Claudia grabs his hand where it had been hovering over her, pressing it into the spot where she had felt the kicking. Her voice, high-pitched and excited, pulls in the attention of the rest of station. “Feel!”

The whole station shares in the excitement of the moment, a small gathering of police officers who all push and shove for a chance to pamper the newest ‘station mother’. And, in a small town like Beacon Hills, it doesn’t take long for almost everyone else to hear the news as well.

This baby is healthy. This one might make it.

After that it’s like they get a second wind. They let themselves feel excited for this baby. Glowing with every little kick or movement. Growing longer and more frequent as the weeks pass. The ultrasound says they’re having a girl. They’re having a Sophie.

Twenty six weeks in Noah and Claudia fall asleep excited for their new little girl to arrive.

The next day Claudia says she cannot feel her moving.

The nurse at the hospital tells them the baby has died. Apparently after twenty weeks it’s not called a miscarriage anymore. The baby won’t just fall out to leave Claudia hollow and aching, there has to be an induced labour. A stillbirth.

24 hours later Noah is looking down at the second child he has lost. This one looks more human, more alive despite the blistering of her wrists and the greying of her skin. Claudia is resting, pumped full of painkillers and sedatives to help with her distress and the labour.

It is the first time Noah truly cries since his mother died. Great heaving sobs as he sits alone in the hospital’s wait room. Head in his hands as he all but wails.  
A staff member is sent in to calm him. Apparently his grief is disturbing the other patrons.

Melissa McCall brings him lukewarm tea and holds his hand with such genuine care he manages to pull himself together. They are not friends. She is a passing face in a sea of scrub-dressed hospital staff. But she is kind to him in this moment, and he never forgets that.

It isn’t until much later they grow close, and even then she’d always been closer to Claudia. It is their children who dictate their relationships. Almost friends, single parents struggling together.

The loss of this second child knocks something loose in Noah. Alcohol starts to slowly fill the cupboards in the house. It’s not much. Just a glass every now and then. Just to calm his nerves.

He’s not an alcoholic. His father had been, probably still is. He doesn’t know. They don’t talk.

He remembers though. Remembers how he used to drink.

No matter what happens he promises himself he won’t end up like that.

There is another grave in the family plot. Larger than Madeleine’s, smaller than his mother’s. And a new name to mourn for.

Sophie Stilinski.

Things really do start to feel like they’re falling apart then. Claudia and Noah don’t talk. Not the way they used to. Not about anything important. He works too long and too hard and she won’t afford herself the time to grieve. Had refused to even look at the corpse of their baby before they put her in the ground.

Claudia doesn’t approve of Noah’s drinking. She does not outwardly berate him for it, but every time she sees him with a glass she turns up her nose. Excuses herself or makes a short apology and turns in early to bed. It makes him feel guilty all the same, but he doesn’t stop. Not because he can’t. He has full control of himself. But because he doesn’t want to.

It’s just one glass. Just every once in a while.

It helps.

A little.

The two of them are tip-toeing around each other. Two bombs just waiting to go off. Wanting that excuse to let go, explode. To yell and scream and throw words at one another like they’re weapons. Claudia is itching for a fight and Noah is just itching for the fight to be over. Because at least if they fight they might get somewhere.

They’re sitting down to dinner a few months later. Hurt still fresh, but they’ve been here before. Claudia has cooked. Klopsiki, something her mother used to make. They’re eating in silence, the only sound the clinking of silverware on ceramic plates.

Noah pours himself a stiff drink, lifting the glass to take a sip.

“Put it down, Noah.”

She doesn’t even know why she says it. This isn’t anything new; he’s not drinking very much at all. It’s just a glass with dinner, she’s tolerated worse.

Maybe she’s just tired of waiting for an excuse.

“What?” It’s a genuinely innocent question. He’s caught off guard, confused by how sudden this is. Like someone has just told him he’s standing in a minefield.

“I said put it down.”

There’s the briefest of pauses before Noah complies. Brow creased, surprise giving way to distress. Anger maybe, if he let the feeling of it consume him.

“What’s going on Claudia?”

“Nothing,” she says. Too short, too sharp. Biting. “Don’t drink at the dinner table.”

Get angry.

“This has never been a problem before.”

“Well it is now.”

Please get angry.

“Claudia-“

He reaches across the table to take her hand. She pulls back, snaps her limbs back into herself like she’s flicked a rubber band. Fast and sharp. Angry. There’s a fire clawing its way up her throat. The pulling of a trigger to a war in their dining room.

“Don’t! You can’t-“

Can’t what? Drink? Comfort her? She doesn’t know why she’s angry. Doesn’t know what she wants to fight about. She’s let herself sit still for too long. Anxious for a distraction. Anything but the stifling silence they’ve been living in.

She stands abruptly, knocking into the dining table and sending her plate clattering to the ground. Turns away, walks briskly down the hall and locks herself in the bathroom.

“Claudia!” More clattering as Noah tries to navigate the broken glass and cramped furniture. Knocking loudly on the door. “Claudia, open up!”

“No!”

“Claudia, what’s going on?” he asks gently, “Talk to me.”

“Go away Noah! I can’t do this! I can’t-” She lets out a sob. When did she start crying? “Maybe we should- Maybe you should leave.”

“I’m not leaving Claudia. Please, open the door.”

“I mean- I mean maybe you should leave me. Maybe I’m no good.”

Silence.

Maybe he really has left.

“Claudia, don’t.” The words are a whisper. So, so quiet. “We’ve been married for nine years. I wouldn’t- I won’t leave you. I’ll- Is it the drinking? I didn’t think- I can stop. I’ll stop. Right now, if that’s- Claudia. Clauds please.”

“I can’t give you what you want Noah. I can’t give you a family. There’s something broken inside me.” She’s crying in earnest now. Great heaving sobs that wrack her lungs and make her whole body shudder. She leans against the door for stability but ends up sliding down it, sprawled out on the tiles anyway.

“Claudia, stop. I have a family. You are my family.”

A few years ago they were on opposite sides of this argument.

“You’d be a wonderful father,” she tells him softly.

“And you’d be a wonderful mother.” There’s a pause, like he’s arranging his thoughts the right way. “Claudia. Even if we never have children, even if we spend our whole lives in this shitty house, I would still be happy. You’re everything to me Claudia. I wouldn’t mind having nothing else in life if I could grow old with you.”

There it is. Noah’s suffocating affection.

It’s like she’s drowning in it.

When she doesn’t say anything he continues. “I didn’t- Growing up I didn’t have much. My father couldn’t hold down a job and he was cruel and my mum- I didn’t have much but I had her.”

Noah doesn’t talk much about his life before he met Claudia. Not at all, really. She doesn’t know why he’s talking about it now.

“After she died I didn’t know what I was going to do. My dad was- He isn’t a good man. And I ended up couch surfing for most of my last year of high school just to get away from him. Things were rough. I wouldn’t even have gone to college if I hadn’t managed that scholarship.” He sighs. There’s a soft thud where his head knocks back against the door, sat mirrored to Claudia on the other side. “My mum was amazing though. She was so strong and amazing, but she was scared all the time…”

“Why are you telling me this Noah?”

“She would have loved you Clauds. God knows I do.”

“I want to give you this family Noah. It’s important.”

“And we can try again Claudia, when you’re really ready. But it doesn’t have to be now, or at all.”

Claudia doesn’t leave the bathroom, not for several hours. Neither of them knows this at the time, but this outburst is the first of many to follow. The mood swings, the obsession. They don’t recognise these symptoms of frontotemporal dementia because they’d never thought they’d have to.

And if their lives hadn’t been rough enough already, they only got harder from here.

A few months later Claudia receives a phone call. Her father has passed away after a stroke, the second family member she loses that year. Her mother wants to make sure he’s buried in Poland, where most of her family still lives.

She asks Claudia to come with her.

But she can’t. Claudia left Poland when she was only eleven years old. She has so few memories of her old home, such little connection. What she has here is her husband. Her life. Her hope of building something better than failed dreams of playing the piano and dead children.

She refuses.

Mieczysław Gomolka is buried in his own family plot, thousands of miles away from Claudia.

He misses the birth of his only grandson and the death of his only child, and all the joy and sadness in between.

Finally, two years later, Claudia conceives for one last time. This baby carries no excitement, no charm. Just heaviness.

They move out of the old house. Neither of them can stand the idea of having a child stay in the nursery they had prepared. That was Madeleine’s nursery, Sophie’s. Not this baby. This time it will be different. They’ll have a yard, enough rooms for all the junk they’ve collected over the years. They’ll live closer to the school, and the police station. Claudia can have a room for her piano, Noah can have an office, and there will still be another room for the baby.

The walls are blue this time. Dark, dark blue. Noah worries it’s too heavy a colour for a nursery, but Claudia says it’s just right. The way it’s meant to be.

The books and toys are unpacked yet again, organised in a way that’s almost routine at this point.

There is no excitement, but there is hope.

Because none of the other pregnancies were successful they need to go in for check-ups and prescriptions much more frequently.

This is where Claudia’s hatred of hospitals begins, where it grows and where it eventually consumes her. But for now this is about her baby, and she will do what she must to protect him.

The pregnancy this time holds little fortune from the start. The baby is developing too slowly, won’t rest in the right positions and the lining of the uterus is too thin. The doctor tells them not to get their hopes up. They will likely lose this baby too.

Noah leaves his wife to find them both something to eat after yet another check-up. Claudia is twelve weeks along, without so much as a slight bump to indicate the child growing inside her.

It’s a miracle the pregnancy has come even this far along.

Melissa sits beside her. Forever getting too attached to her patients, Claudia most of all. She’s holding one pale hand between her own healthy olive ones, trying to reassure her.

“You’re doing everything right,” she says, like it’s supposed to help somehow, “No one could ask any more of you. And- I know you want this baby to-”

“It’s okay,” Claudia interrupts, mostly to get her to shut up. She loves Melissa, she really does. But this is one thing she will not be pitied for. “It’s okay. He’s going to be okay. I know it.”

The young nurse blinks, surprised. “It’s good to be optimistic Claudia, but you have to understand-”

“He’s going to be okay,” she says again. Like a mantra or a prayer, only there is no hope in her words. Only certainty.

There is a look in Claudia’s dark brown eyes that day that scares Melissa. She doesn’t understand it then. How she knows the baby will live, why she’s so certain it will be a boy. Even later, when the delusions start and Claudia claims her little boy is trying to kill her, the pieces do not fit. Not until Melissa’s life stops being fact and starts feeling a lot more like fiction. When werewolves and banshees are the least of her concerns, and a magic tree sits oddly high on the list.

“Alright,” she agrees, only for fear of setting the young woman on edge. She’s grown more anxious over the time Melissa has known her. Jumpier, more prone to extreme emotion. It doesn’t worry anyone, she’s always been a little eccentric and she’s stressed with her new baby on the way. There are a million and one excuses not to worry about her.

A million and one signs everyone ignored.

“He’ll be fine. I made sure of it. My boy will live.”

When Claudia and Noah Stilinski welcome their little boy into the world on the 8th of April it is a bright and sunny day in Beacon Hills.

Claudia is already dying, Noah is already drinking and though no one knows it Mieczysław Stilinski is already drowning in the supernatural magic of Beacon Hills with the very first time he takes a breath.


	2. Tuesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've dropped this chapter a half day early because I've got a heap of study to do this evening. So lucky for you but also big oof for me.
> 
> As always the warnings are in the end notes, enjoy!

From a young age Stiles had been incredibly confused about his own name. Not because it was hard to pronounce, no, his mother had made sure he could say it correctly the moment he’d learnt to attach it to himself. The real problem lay in that he had too many of them.

His full name is Mieczysław Stilinski, which was short enough he supposes, but he has yet to meet anyone (besides his own mother) who will call him by his given name.

His father calls him Stiles, a family nickname apparently, but he’s never heard anyone call his dad that so he’s not sure where it came from. His mother calls him Mischief, some long running joke from his infancy he can’t recall. And for the longest time he’d been convinced his name might have been ‘No’ or ‘Don’t’, he certainly heard the two words directed at him enough that they could have been.

Introducing himself to his kindergarten teacher had been a nightmare.

Because of his complications so early on in life Stiles starts school a little later than everyone else. He is five, but he’s grouped with all the four year olds. This is something he complains about to no end, bargaining with his parents to be moved up with the other older more “mature” kids at the preschool.

Even at such a young age Stiles is still so full of fight. And the never-ending need to get his own way.

No less than a week into kindergarten Stiles sits alone. He abstinently refuses to hang out with any of the ‘little kids’ and has such ostracised himself from the rest of his class. Despite his rocky start Stiles has fully caught up on all the growing he needed to do by his first birthday, had even overtaken most boys in his age bracket by his second. He is tall for a child, as if making up for how tiny he had been in the beginning. He towers above kids his own age, but to a group of four year olds he looks like a giant.

It is a Tuesday, very little tends to happen to Stiles on a Tuesday, but this one in particular is incredibly important in the short chronicle of his life so far. It is the day Stiles meets his first, and for a long time only friend.

Scott McCall is four but he is also very tall for his age. He is thin and wiry where Stiles is still in the process of losing the baby fat from around his cheeks and tummy. They’ve been in the same class for a while now, but neither has really taken notice of the other. Scott is a quiet kid, shy almost, but he’s really good at reading (it makes Stiles a little jealous). Stiles is loud and abrasive and can’t seem to regulate his own energy levels. Even if they had met before today it is unlikely Stiles would remember.

Usually Scott is reading inside, but today Miss Arney is trying to encourage him to interact with the other kids. So young Scott is sitting in the sandpit building a castle in easy silence.

There is one big problem with this scene though.

The corner in which Scott is sitting is Stiles’ corner.

It’s prime real estate for a kindergartner. Right at the edge of the sandpit, where the brightly coloured planks of the wooden border meet to make a comfortable chair where you don’t have to worry about getting sand in your pants. It’s also only a few feet away from the taps you’re supposed to use to wash your hands after finger painting, which means you can dash off to grab a bucket full of water for your castle moat without worrying about your masterpiece being stepped on.

Mind you, Stiles has never had the patience to finish a sandcastle in its entirety.

That doesn’t matter though. It is his spot, and in the world of a five year old Scott has just committed an offense punishable by death.

“Hey!” Stiles shouts at the kid, which is completely unnecessary when they’re standing so close together, “That’s my spot!”

Scott blinks up at him, sandy fingers pushing too long hair out of his eyes. Stiles knows his name because he’s wearing a nametag and even if he’s not a perfect reader yet he’s still really good at it. Stiles is wearing a nametag too, but it has his proper first name on it and he takes a little bit of pride in knowing the boy won’t be able to read his in return.

“Sorry,” Scott says. Sounding small and timid despite the fact that he’s almost as tall as Stiles is.

It makes him feel bad for shouting.

“It’s okay. We can share,” he says sagely, with all the wisdom of a little boy still fawning over his own maturity in a kingdom of children. And if Stiles is the king he supposes this boy can be his knight. “Are you building a castle?”

“Yeah. Do you want to join?”

“Yeah!”

This is the start of a long and very complicated friendship. The two boys are very different, as different as two kids their age can be. Stiles is a supernova of energy, always bouncing between ideas and activities and tasks, happy to abandon anything that has lost his attention for even a second. Scott prefers to be much neater. He always finishes up his games and stories with neat endings, cleans up after himself (and Stiles on occasion) and is happy to simply follow direction rather than carve his own path.

He is much more a timid puppy than the knight Stiles had been hoping he’d be.

Still, he couldn’t ask for a better friend. Scott is incredibly loyal, to the point where he will deny other offers of friendship so as not to sully the bond he has created with Stiles. They form a weird kind of co-dependency. At school they are never apart. They eat together, play together, go to the bathroom together, read together, nap together, and get in trouble together (this one is usually Stiles’ fault, but Scott seems all too happy to balance out the punishment between the two of them).

They’re friends all of one week before Stiles decides he would die for the boy.

Scott’s good for him. His quiet demeanour and manners help reel in some of Stiles’ poorer habits. The world stops revolving only around himself and he has to make allowances for the young Scott McCall.

Scott eats slower than him, and he always throws his rubbish in the bin, so Stiles follows suit. Scott must always clean up when he’s finished playing with toys, so Stiles lingers even as his interest fades to help him. He washes his hands before every meal and folds his blanket after naps and gets really upset if his clothes get dirty while they’re playing.

“Are you always like that?” Stiles asks one day. Children have very little tact to begin with, but Stiles has even less than average. People say he gets it from his mum.

“Like what?”

“Like that,” Stiles repeats, as if the emphasis will aid his coherency.

Apparently it does because Scott blinks his big dark eyes at Stiles and his nose gets all scrunched up the way it does when something happens that he doesn’t like. “I guess so. My dad doesn’t like it when I leave a mess behind.”

“Oh.”

For some reason it surprises Stiles that his friend has a dad at all. When Scott talks about his home life he always talks about his mum. She’s always the one who picks him up from school and writes nice messages in his lunchbox and who comes in when the teacher has to call home about his bad behaviour. Until that very moment Scott’s father hadn’t existed in Stiles’ world.

“Why not?” he asks, curious now that he’s found a new fact to dig at and explore.

“Mum says it’s because he was in the army and lots of people in the army get taught to keep things really tidy.”

“My dad was in the army too!” Stiles crows, grabbing onto Scott’s arm and jumping up and down in excitement. He’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough for the two of them to get excited over the fact.

This is not the last conversation they have about Scott’s father, and this is not the only similarity their parents share. In the years to come Raphael McCall grows more and more stern, wearing away at his wife and son until one day he just isn’t there at all. Stiles isn’t sad to see him go, not really. When he’s a little bit older and his vocabulary has expanded a little bit more he learns there is a word for describing people like him.

Dickhead.

In first grade Melissa has to go away for a while to spend time with her ill sister back in Mexico. During her trip there Raphael is in charge of caring for Scott, a change everyone notices.

Gone is Scott’s neatly brushed hair and well planned outfits. He comes to school looking like he was dressed by a blind man; more often than not he doesn’t have any lunch (or even lunch money for the cafeteria) and sometimes has to wait for hours for his father to remember to pick him up.

This is what starts the long cycle of sleepovers between the Stilinski and the McCall house. Camping trips that could last over a week and which occurred so frequently they each had their own designated drawer at the opposing house. It was fun, and it took Scott’s mind off of how much his dad would drink or how much his parents would fight.

It is also around this time Stiles is diagnosed with ADHD. He starts taking small doses of Adderall, just enough to slow down his overactive brain, allow him to focus.

All at once Stiles goes from unable to focus on any one thing too long to only being able to focus on one thing at a time. He becomes obsessive and incessant. Whatever he is doing, no matter how menial or commonplace, was the most important thing in the world until he’d managed to complete it.

It’s amazing how quickly his grades pick up when he starts applying himself religiously to completing his homework. Until he learns how to find that precarious balance between obsessive and frenzied, giving himself back a microgram of freedom.

His mum starts taking pills too, though no one will tell him what for. He thinks maybe she might have ADHD too, because both of them jump around from idea to idea at the same pace, but her pills are a different colour. A different shape.

And she takes way more of them than he does.

He starts to notice other things too. Like how his mum doesn’t drive anymore, how she starts teaching him piano (she’d tried this before too, but she seems more serious about it now, carves out a special time in both their schedules for lessons and practice), the way she’s always tired. Their little things, unimportant to a child. Especially when his parents become a lot more lax about rules and buying him things. Lapping up the distraction without ever questioning it.

But he is young, and at eight years old he believes himself invincible. Untouchable to all the bad things in the world. He is just a little boy surrounded by love and whose biggest problem in life so far was that Jackson Whittemore made fun of his sneakers when he was trying out for lacrosse.

A lot of things happen at once then. When Stiles is eight Melissa finally tells her husband to leave, there is a short (tear-filled) divorce and suddenly she is a single parent. She spends a lot of time in the Stilinski house after that, not that Stiles minds, it means he gets to see Scott more often.

Today is one of those days where all of the adults hang out in the kitchen while he and Scott are banished upstairs to play with Stiles’ very new and very expensive Xbox. A surprise gift meant to distract him from the three days mum wasn’t at home last month. The distractions are starting to wear thin though; he’s starting to notice these things more and more. The increasing number of pills in the bathroom cabinet, the way his mum has changed.

He is a child, but he’s not an idiot. He knows something is wrong.

Today, a Tuesday, has been a particularly bad day. He knows this because when mum is having a bad day his dad is too. His mum will swallow back more pills than usual; try to wander through her day in a listless haze, and his dad will drink more as a result.

He worries sometimes that his dad will start drinking the same way Mr. McCall did. That if he does he’ll disappear the same way too.

Stiles is downstairs when he isn’t supposed to be. Scott wanted a snack and so Stiles had snuck down very quietly, trying not to disturb the grown-ups as he digs through the cabinet for the pretzels he knows his dad keeps back there. Little pieces of the conversation making their way to his ears.

“God, I’m so sorry about this. You both have so much on your plate already,” Melissa says. Her voice is thick, strangled. She’s been crying again, he realises. It had surprised Stiles the first time he’d caught her doing that. She was such a strong person; he didn’t think she would cry over anything.

Especially not someone like Scott’s dad.

“Don’t be silly Mel, we’re happy to do this,” his mum says, “Please don’t let this get in the way of your own troubles. We still want to be there for you.”

“I know. I know, I just- I wish there was something I could do for you in return.”

There’s shuffling and for a moment Stiles freezes, thinking someone is going to walk over and find him where he shouldn’t be.

“Hush, you’ve been a godsend with Stiles. I’m glad he and Scott get along so well, it’ll help when I’m gone.”

Gone? Is she leaving?

He abandons his search for the pretzels, shuffling closer to where Melissa and his mother sit. Holding his breath for fear that even that might give away his position. His palms feel sticky where they’re pressed against the cold floorboards of the kitchen, needing to peel them off when he needs to push his hair out of his eyes. Slow, careful.

“Don’t talk like that Claudia.”

“Why? Ignoring it isn’t going to make it any less true. I’m a realist Melissa, there’s no saving me from this. And when I die I need you to be there for my boys. For Mischief and Noah both.”

He wasn’t supposed to hear this. Not in a million, billion years. His mother is dying. She is going to die, and from the sounds of their conversation it doesn’t sound like that day will be too far away either. It doesn’t sound like they can save her.

Tears well up in Stiles’ eyes and he has to bite his lip to keep back a hiccup, sneaking away and back up the stairs to where Scott awaits his return.

“Where are the pretzels?” he asks, looking for all the world like a distraught puppy when he finds the snacks are nowhere in sight.

“We didn’t have any,” Stiles lies easily rather than explain why he had abandoned his search. He didn’t know he could do that, could lie so easily. Then again, he supposes his parents have been lying to him for a while now so it can’t be too hard.

How long have they been keeping this from him?

This lie is the start of a long and dangerous game in which Stiles builds a fortress around himself. Little lies, big lies. Anything to keep himself protected from the hurt and to protect everyone else from the fallout. He doesn’t enjoy doing it, never does.

And it’s just every once in a while, not all the time. Just when he needs the attention off of him or on something else. When he needs a break, a breather, a reprieve. It’s not that he needs the lies. He can stop any time he wants.

There are just some flaws you inherit from your parents without ever meaning to.

That same year Melissa has to pull him out of class when his father collapses at work. It is, would you believe it, a Tuesday.

He’s had a heart attack.

Apparently he’s had high blood pressure for years, a condition he hadn’t known about until his mismanagement of it took a great enough toll as to knock him flat. He’s fine now, stable. There are going to be some major changes in his lifestyle to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, but he’ll survive.

But when Stiles goes in to see him, eyes tracing the pale form of his father propped up in a hospital bed, hooked up to any number of machines that beep and whiz and growl, something inside him snaps. A dam breaking as he throws himself against his father’s side.

What if he had died?

His mother was already dying, so what if that happened to his father as well?

He’d be all alone.

A promise is made that day between Stiles and the walls of his father’s hospital room. He will look after his dad. He will protect him from all the bad the universe is trying to throw at them.

The stress exacerbates his mother’s condition too. She gets worse, much worse than before.

One day, exactly a month after his initial collapse, his father is out of the house. A check-up of some kind to make sure he’s fit enough to go back to work. Stiles and Claudia are home alone. She’s been strange for a while now, not in any way Stiles can really place. They still play piano together, but she doesn’t sit as close as she used. She’s stopped watching him practice for lacrosse in the yard too, but he’d brushed it off as just another symptom.

She’d been so tired recently.

His mother is sitting by the piano now, tapping way at the keys distractedly and without rhythm while she waits for her husband to return. She struggles to find the energy to do much of anything when he’s not around.

Stiles, completely unaware of the consequences of his actions, decides he’ll make her a cup of tea. She loves the stuff and he’s gotten really good at making it for her.

He knocks softly on the doorframe, not wanting to startle his mother as was sometimes prone to happen if you didn’t announce your presence. Carrying the hot cup of tea over to her with perhaps too much care, not wanting his naturally out of control limbs to spill it.

She looks up, almost excited, but her face falls when she sees him.

“Where’s Noah?” she asks. It sounds like an accusation.

“Dad went to the doctor’s,” Stiles explains gently, taking a few tentative steps into the room before holding the steaming mug out for his mother, each movement slow and measured so that he won’t spill anything or trip over his own feet, “Here.”

She takes it gingerly, cradling it between her own frigid fingers as if savouring the warmth. There is a flicker of her old self in that moment. A Claudia who had greatly enjoyed teaching her son to make tea and who drank every cup he brought her, even his truly terrible first attempts. Too much sugar, too little milk, smiling at him over the rim of her mug.

Lifting the cup closer to her face she peers in on its contents, a frown creasing her brow.

“What is this?”

“Tea?” That wasn’t supposed to come out as a question.

“No,” Claudia says. Firm and almost angry. He can’t remember a time his mother had ever truly been angry at him. “It isn’t.”

“Mama, it’s just tea. I made it for you,” he explains easily. There is a hint of pride there for this small task he has completed.

“Stop lying!” she screeches, standing abruptly and throwing the mug to the floor. The carpet buffers the fall so it doesn’t break, but the tar-coloured water stains the once pristine white fabric. “Don’t lie to me Mieczysław!”

“I’m not!” he shouts back, mostly because he’s not sure what else to do.

She surges forwards then, grabbing his shoulders, fingers digging in painfully, shaking him violently enough that his head snaps back and forth with the force of it. “Don’t lie to me! Don’t you dare! After everything I’ve done for you!”

“Mama! Mama stop! You’re hurting me!” he sobs. The fear has brought him to tears, knees quaking. He’s sure the only reason he’s still standing is because his mother’s grip is so tight on his shoulders.

There are going to be bruises.

He’s not sure what does it, not sure if any one thing does really or if it just happens, but something causes her to snap back into herself. She steps back quickly, as though afraid to be too close to her son, watching from a distance as he crumples to the floor. Sobbing to himself as his mother stands over him. She doesn’t move to comfort the boy.

Doesn’t trust herself enough.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to no one in particular. Her eyes have gone glassy, staring down at the spilled drink. At her son.

It is just tea.

He is just a boy.

She locks him in the piano room then. Not to hurt him, to protect him. She doesn’t trust herself with her own son.

She calls Noah, begs him to come home right away between great heaving sobs and hushed apologies.

“I hurt him Noah. I hurt Mieczysław. He was- I just- Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Shh. It’s okay. Calm down Claudia,” there’s the sound of squealing tires as he takes a corner too fast, “It’s okay. I’m almost home. Just breathe. Deep breaths, in and out. Where is Stiles now?”

“I locked him in the piano room. I don’t want to hurt him. I didn’t-“

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Stay calm. Stay on the phone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Further discussion of poor mental health. Minor violence towards a child. Small mentions of alcoholism.
> 
> As a tasty treat I'm also dropping the title for next week's chapter: Grief, Grief, Grief.


	3. Grief, Grief, Grief

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dropping this chapter early, this time only by about 4ish hours, but still. I got more study to do and chores that are going to take me ten times as long while I'm on crutches. But what can you do.
> 
> Warnings in the end notes as always for anyone who wants them!

Only a few days after the outburst Stiles’ father sits him down in the dining room so they can talk about what happened. The dining room is the centre of all their important conversations, and he gets the feeling this one will be no different.

He’s too big to really be picked up and carried around now. He’s nine, still tall for his age, and his baby fat is slowly falling from him as the years pass. His cheeks are still soft and round, they flush easily in exertion and sadness and joy, but his clothes don’t stretch quite as tight around his frame as they used to. This doesn’t seem to dissuade Noah though, scooping his son into his arms tenderly before depositing him on the age-worn wood of the dining table, leaning over him with a pained expression on his face. He doesn’t know how to start, doesn’t know if there is even a right way to go about this.

“Stiles,” he begins, faltering under the weight of his son’s gaze. Honey brown eyes so much like Claudia’s cutting through him. “Stiles, your mum is very sick, and she’s going to be sick for a long time. Do you understand?”

He nods, eerily silent. It is the quietest Noah has seen him in years. Even when the boy couldn’t form a proper sentence he used to babble non-stop. Broken words he had been too distracted or excited to finish. It is unnerving to see him like this now.

“You know that sometimes she’s not at home,” he continues carefully, “That’s because she has to go to the hospital sometimes so the doctors can help her. She’s- They’re doing everything they can, but she’s got a very special type of sickness and it’s very hard to make her better again. Because it’s not her body that’s sick, it’s her head. That’s why sometimes she can be very happy and then all of a sudden sad or angry, and it’s also why she grabbed you. She didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He pauses to tuck a dark strand of hair behind his son’s ear. It’s getting long again, unruly. Claudia was always the one who would take him to get it cut, its length now just another sign of her deterioration. Another simple task forgotten, slipping from her mind, between her fingers.

“She’s dying,” Stiles says suddenly, the bluntness of the statement ringing in the air between them for a long few moments before he speaks again, “I heard her talking to Scott’s mum. She said she was going to die.”

Noah wants to ask when exactly he heard this, which of the hundreds of similar conversations over the years he had picked it up from. It breaks his heart to think his son has been carrying this weight around for any longer than he’s had to. “Not for a while yet,” he whispers softly, as if it’s supposed to be some kind of comfort.

Stiles sniffles, twisting his fingers in his lap and watching the way they move so he won’t have to look up, “I don’t want her to die.”

His voice breaks over the words, tumbling over the lump in his throat as tears well up in his eyes. His face is flushed, cheeks red and warm, watery roads carved down them as he sobs. His entire body shifts with the force of them, heaving with every breath.

Noah swallows heavily, also struggling to push words out around the chokehold of his emotion. He pulls his son against his chest, holds him there as he presses a kiss into the dark swath of hair atop his head. “Neither do I.”

They sit together like that for a long time, Stiles clings to his father like a lifeline. Sobbing heavily into the man’s shirt. The air is heavy with their grief, the mourning for a woman who has not passed yet. Claudia is still alive, but she is dying, and that is a heavy truth for a little boy to bear.

Sometimes, when he is all alone and his thoughts are loud, Stiles wonders if he had lost her long before they’d lowered her into the ground.

Things only get worse after that.

Not immediately. It’s a slow decline; every outburst seems to come just that little bit sooner, grows a little more violent, last a little bit longer. By the time Stiles’ ninth birthday swings around Claudia hardly leaves the house. Most days she stays shut away in her bedroom, as though afraid to even traverse her own home, finding solitude in locked doors and little responsibility.

She loses all sense of time and control. She eats all the time, as though unable to remember her last meal and is desperate to fill herself. She goes up three sizes in just a few months before she’s forced to slow down. She can’t stick to any kind of schedule, doesn’t seem to understand how her actions will affect others. In some ways she becomes much like a child. The world revolves around her; without filter and without empathy she is the centre of everything.

The paranoia grows too. Doors have to be locked, locked again and locked again. Checked and double checked and triple checked. The windows must all remain shut, even in the sweltering core of summer when heat settles heavy in the house without a source of relief. Strangers are no longer allowed in their home for any reason and she will not leave, convinced stepping outside will cause her harm.

The stovetop and the microwave frighten her, though not as much as the sink does. She jumps at the smallest of sounds, the clinking of dishes or the whir of the dryer. Sometimes her eyes will land on Stiles and they will stick, wide and fearful and hateful, and he will cower under it until he can escape.

It is around this time that the nightmares begin as well. Awful, fitful dreams that toss her around in the bed and force Noah out onto the couch. The tossing turns to moaning turns to a visceral screaming that pours from her lips and floods the house. On nights when Claudia doesn’t sleep neither does anyone else. It can take hours for her to calm down, to stop her wailing and sobbing and screeching. Noah will hold her, as a comfort and as a protection against her own thrashing, and in the morning he will drink away the exhaustion.

Noah drinks most days now. It helps him cope, helps him sleep on the few nights his wife isn’t screaming and helps him last through the day after nights where she does. He’s never looked so pale, almost as pale as Claudia herself, and the deep bruising under his eyes only seems to get worse and worse. As if her sickness ails him too.

Stiles fairs only marginally better. He nods off in class sometimes, can’t seem to make it through a day without some kind of nap, but he thinks he functions alright. Scott watches out for him at school, and his dad seems too preoccupied to mind that he practically passes out when he gets home.

His life becomes nocturnal. He works in the dark hours of the night and sleeps through his days. It’s easier this way. It means he’s ready for the screaming, keeps his headphones in just in case tonight will be another bad night.

He’s fine, he’s coping.

His grades plummet and the teacher calls his dad. Noah promises changes will be made to help his son.

There’s an effort at least, a schedule drawn up to help and a doctor’s appointment to prescribe him something to help him sleep. Nothing really changes though, his father too busy with work and Claudia to monitor his son as well, but Stiles gets better at hiding that he’s struggling. He learns how to deflect and obscure and put on a mask so that people won’t ask questions, won’t look too hard or poke at the thin veil of his composure. He becomes a locked box with a pretty lid, a smile wrapped around his own anxiety.

Talking, he finds, is a great tactic. If he just talks and talks and talks eventually people grow tired of asking questions and they leave him alone. He fills himself with knowledge to quell the fear that he’ll run out of things to say. He drinks up encyclopaedias and Wikipedia pages and articles on everything under the sun. He’s a half genius at everything, a well of useless facts and vague understandings that can spit out a definition at the drop of a hat.

He still struggles with math, but he figures that’s a boring topic anyway.

One night Stiles is home alone. Well, Claudia is there, but it’s practically the same as being on his own. His dad is out of the house. Whether at work or in some bar he has no idea.

It is eerily quiet, growing into the dark hours of the late evening. He’s doing homework, attempting to keep up with everything to avoid another phone call like the last one (the teachers are always calling home about something, no matter how hard he tries. He is, in their words, challenging. Outspoken. Brilliant, but lacking in focus). He enjoys the precarious smile his father gives him when he shows the man the grades he gets on tests. Anything but the sheer exhaustion he’d exposed at the prospect of needing to chase after his son as well as his wife.

He’s so absorbed in his work he doesn’t even realise he hasn’t eaten until his stomach growls at him angrily, prompting him to leave the safety of his bedroom. He walks the halls quietly on bare feet, careful to make little sound as he descends the stairs and heads for the kitchen. Claudia is sleeping and he can only hope she won’t wake with his stumbling.

Only when he reaches the kitchen the light is on. And Claudia is standing inside the open pantry rifling around for food of her own.

“Mama?” Stiles calls gently, cringing when she jumps at the sound of his voice. Head snapping around like a whip, fearful brown eyes landing on her son before they soften.

Today must be a good day.

“Mieczysław, sweetheart, what are you doing up?” She turns from the cupboard, kneeling in front of him as if he was still a little boy and not already nine years old. He won’t call her out on it though; sometimes her memory isn’t very good. She can forget what day it is, or where they are, or even that Stiles exists at all.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he lies easily, shrugging, “So I came to get something to eat.”

Claudia smiles at him, wide and pleasant. Her eyes look clearer today, more aware, and it looks like she even went to the trouble of preparing herself a meal instead of gorging through raw produce. Her hair is washed; it shines healthily in the dim kitchen lights, dark brown and vibrant.

She’s still stiff. The aches in her joints don’t ever seem to go away, not even on good days, and they make her movements slow and small.

“I’m making myself a sandwich, would you like one?” she asks.

Stiles nods enthusiastically, moving to help her before he’s shooed away to sit at the table.

“Stop that, what good is a mother who can’t make her own son some dinner,” she teases lightly, but there is a weight in her words she doesn’t fully grasp. There is so little she can do for her son now, so little she even finds the energy to try.

Doing as he is told Stiles sits, legs swinging in the air as he talks to his mother. Claudia smiles and nods and laughs in all the right places. She follows the conversation pretty well, losing herself only a few times throughout and asking Stiles to repeat himself. She takes an interest in what he’s doing at school; she asks about Scott and Melissa, makes comment on his growth.

“It feels like every time I look at you you’ve aged an extra year,” she sighs, pushing around the crumbs on her plate. “Children just never stop growing. Soon you’re going to be all grown up and I won’t ever get to see it.”

“Don’t say that mama.” He swallows heavily. He hates this topic, hates how often it comes up and how resigned to her fate his mother is.

“It’s true. I’m sick Stiles, you know that. I’m just glad I could make sure you were safe. When he told me only one of us could be saved I knew it had to be you. I was all broken inside, but he fixed me. He fixed me so you would be okay.”

Silence settles. Claudia continues pushing around the remains of her food, unperturbed. As if she hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary.

The evening air feels stifling.

“Mama, what are you talking about?” he asks carefully, unsure as to whether or not he really wants to hear the answer.

Claudia turns to him, brow creased in confusion. As if surprised he didn’t know already. Couldn’t understand why he wasn’t keeping up with her nonsense conversation. “Don’t be silly,” she says, and Stiles winces for the bite in her tone that never comes, “The angel.”

Oh.

She’s being literal, he realises. There is no comedy to her tone, no knowing smile to clue him in to her game. It is just a statement. A fact.

And she looks so sure of herself in that moment, clinging to this piece of reality that makes no sense to him. More of her delusions, her ramblings more frequent now. Stiles knows she had once been very religious, had attended church with her when he was younger and she was still willing to leave the house. He was perhaps much less devout than she had been, for even in the few moments he let himself sink into the idea that there could be a God he couldn’t accept that He would let his mother suffer like this.

“Your father doesn’t believe me when I tell him about it,” Claudia continues, gaze shifting to stare at the wall across from them. “But he was saved too, because when I’m gone he’s going to need a family. He can’t survive on his own, he’ll need you. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t, he’s just a child and there’s so little his can offer his dad, but he nods anyway.

“You’ll look after him, won’t you?” Claudia asks with sudden seriousness, shifting so she’s sitting closer to her son. Arm pressed up against his companionably, eyes wide and strikingly deep as she looks down at him. He can see himself reflected there, small in the spaces of the room she doesn’t fill.

Her words are quiet. She keeps her hands to herself. She does not scream or grab or even risk the brush of her fingers against her son.

Today is a good day, but only just.

“I promise,” Stiles whispers, resting his head against her shoulder. He can feel the smile on her lips as she presses a kiss into his hair.

“Thank you.”

Stiles does not return to his room that night. Instead he spends a few blissful hours with his mother. Mostly they talk (or, he talks and Claudia listens), but at one point she asks him to play the piano.

She can’t, not anymore. The dementia makes her rigid. Her joints hold like stone and when she tries to play the chords come out clunky and ugly. Years of practice and passion washed away in the face of her illness. Stiles is perhaps only marginally better than her, piano is a hobby for him and not a passion. It was all too easy to put off his lessons for sport and friends and TV when he was younger, and now there are no lessons. Claudia cannot teach; on bad days her patience won’t hold out around Stiles’ fidgeting and even on good days her own concentration seems to wander far too much for any real teaching to get done.

He does as she asks anyway. Plunks out the few simple songs he knows on repeat. She hums along to the uncoordinated melody, keeping things slow so her son can keep up in his clumsy ministrations.

It’s nice. It’s peaceful.

And for a few minutes Stiles can pretend his mother isn’t dying.

They’re both exhausted though, even in their newly found nocturnal lives and the bliss they’re savouring between them. They are still human and sleep is, unfortunately, a necessity. But neither of them can bear a parting. Not when it feels like the first time they’ve really been together in months. So when Stiles helps guide Claudia to bed that night he can’t bring himself to leave, pulling himself up into the large bed of his parents, lying beside his mother, wrapped in her arms.

She is warm, and softer than he remembers from his nights as a young child, crawling into his parents’ bed after nightmares and scary movies he’d been banned from watching. She had been so thin then. Not unhealthy, but maybe almost. The bones of her wrists would knock against him painfully in the night, her clothes loose and flowing over her frame. She is rounder now, a cushion of skin and fat protecting him from her hard edges. She runs hotter now too; a bundle of warmth wrapped nearly the whole way around him in the bed.

He feels safe there with her. A kind of safety he hadn’t felt since the day she’d grabbed him in the piano room. Their interactions tended to be supervised recently; they never spoke if Noah wasn’t there to buffer the conversation. These past few hours together had been the best time Stiles had spent with his mother in a long, long while.

Claudia is moved to the hospital; she can’t stay at home anymore.

Stiles has five new stitches along his hairline. The memories of what exactly happened are foggy. There are flashes of his mother’s face, the weightless feeling of falling as he is pushed backwards. There’s a cracking sound, a searing pain radiating out from the back of his head. The bathroom sink, red and slick with his own blood.

Claudia needs to be supervised. For her own protection. They’re worried she’ll only get worse, more violent as her delusions grow and her mind fails.

And Stiles feels sick with guilt because he’s never been so happy to leave her behind.

Noah drinks and drinks and drinks, an endless flow of alcohol he barely tastes, a desperate attempt to numb himself against the injustice of the world.

Stiles spends most of his time home alone. There is no more screaming at night now, no more terrors waking his mother in her bed, no Claudia at all, but for some reason he still can’t sleep. Even his naps throughout the day have become shorter and shorter, leaving him to run on fumes.

He’s on the verge of collapse.

So Stiles tries his first cup of coffee, shortly after which he vows never to do so again (a vow he eventually breaks, but come on, he was only nine at the time). He could barely focus already, but with the caffeine on board it was like his ADHD had kicked into overdrive. He was bouncing off the walls, jumping from task to task, idea to idea. Unable to rest, unable to stop or sit or think or breathe.

He throws up and that helps a little, knocks some of the drink from his system.

His second solution is to try overdosing on Adderall. Although overdose is a strong word, he thinks, since he only takes a couple (probably closer to four) extra pills, not enough to hurt him.

It’s different from the caffeine, a strange kind of hyper focus. His mind still spins, trying to process everything in the world all at once, but he’s less jittery, and the side effects aren’t so bad. It helps him stay awake in class, and he can keep on top of his homework as well. His grades begin to climb steadily, he participates more readily in school, raises his hand in class to answer questions.

Noah, even in his near constant inebriation, is proud. He tells his son as much one night, watching him study at the kitchen table. Neither of them seems to notice how late it is and in that moment Stiles can’t even bring himself to care.

With his mother out of the house it was like there was room for Stiles again. He didn’t have to hide away in his bedroom, didn’t have to lower his voice at the dinner table (unless Noah had a hangover). He was a free man. Free of the bondage of his mother’s illness, free of the weight of his father’s responsibility.

He felt like a child again, felt like he was allowed to be one again.

Claudia gets worse. Her bad days grow more frequent, the good ones a rare treat. Most of the time when they visit her Stiles has to sit outside in the waiting room or she’ll start screaming again. On good days he can sit with her on the bed. He tells her about school and all the things he’s learning and all the really hard books he doesn’t have to read but chooses to anyway.

He tells her about Lydia, the beautiful redhead in his third grade class. In some ways she reminds him of his mother, before she had gotten sick. Headstrong and intelligent and unafraid to call people out on their bullshit. It’s like looking back in time, seeing the way his mother would have been as a child.

His mum had missed his birthday this year. He’s ten now, finally starting to slow down in his growth. Jackson’s overtaken him, Scott too, and he’s not sure which one annoys him more. He’s also gotten skinnier, baby fat nearly entirely gone. Apparently his gets his gangly limbs from his mother, all sharp bones and spindly arms.

He looks so much like her now.

She’s lost a lot of weight recently without even needing to try. She drops down to the size she was before the dementia had started to get bad, keeps dropping. She’s two sizes smaller now, her ribs stark even under the hospital gown.

She looks like a skeleton, her life leaving her more and more with every pound she sheds. Unable to put them back on again.

“Has your summer break started yet?” Claudia asks voice soft. She’s propped up in the bed, leaning into her son’s space. Apparently today is a really good day because she even holds his hand, and she understands everything he tells her as well.

“Almost, there’s only a week of school left but my teachers are giving out so much homework I don’t think I’ll even have any time to play,” he whines, always so overdramatic. “And Scott says that he’s going to Mexico in the break to see his family so he won’t be around for ages and I’ll be all alone.”

“You’ll have your dad,” his mum slips in, smiling down at him, “I’m sure the two of you can find something to do to entertain yourselves.”

Stiles huffs, burrowing further under his mother’s arm. “He’ll just be working again,” or drinking, but he doesn’t say that, “I’m going to be stuck by myself all summer.”

The serene expression on Claudia’s face shutters for a moment, flickering into a map of concern. “Are you alright Mischief?” she asks, the nickname one she hasn’t used on him in a while. It makes his heart swell. She’s worried, he realises. He’s let too much slip.

“Yeah, I just- No, I’m fine.” Claudia doesn’t look convinced. “Really, I am. I know dad has to work and I know you can’t be at home but-“

“But you’re still lonely,” she finishes for him, running a hand over the bristles of his buzz cut. Noah thought it would be easier to keep it neat this way, and while he wasn’t wrong Stiles misses its length.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You don’t need to apologise sweetheart,” his mother assures him, squeezing him gently in her arms, “You never need to apologise for something like that. You’re only human, we all feel lonely and we all feel frustrated sometimes… Have you told your dad how you feel?”

Stiles shakes his head, a brisk no. He can’t. He can’t add his problems to the mountain his father already has to deal with. He can handle this himself, really, it’s not that bad.

Claudia sighs, as if reading his thoughts and interpreting his anxiety. “I swear of all the things you could inherit from me it had to include my stubbornness. Think about sharing this with him, hmm? He can help.”

“Maybe,” he says, curling up by her side.

They change the subject after that, for which Stiles is eternally grateful. It’s not that he doesn’t want to admit he has feelings; he’d just rather not share the burden of them with people who already have enough to deal with. His parents are such good people and they carry such a heavy load, if he could just shoulder some of it maybe that would help.

Noah shows up some time after, his expression soft as he speaks with his wife. Can hold a conversation with her that doesn’t involve screaming.

This is Claudia’s last good day.

Claudia Stilinski, 36 years old, dies in the summer. Despite the mounting rage that had consumed her in her final years of life she passes peacefully, quiet and still in her hospital bed. She’s thin now, so thin that Stiles can wrap his hand around her wrist, finger to thumb with room to spare. Her hair is limp, dull. Skin pale and not like skin at all, more like tissue paper stretched so tight across her bones it looks like it might tear if someone were to touch her.

Up until this point Stiles’ life had been, for the most part, untouched by death. His only living grandparents were estranged to him, all the significant deaths seeming to have occurred before his birth. Claudia’s father, whose name he inherited and Noah’s mother, whom the man hardly spoke about at all.

Death feels strange now. Not quite as foreign and all too close too quickly. Mortality suddenly feels very fragile and there is something very visceral about seeing a dead body for the first time (and not the last). Something about it hardens him. What is just another corpse compared to the lifeless form of his mother?

The funeral occurs less than a week later and is a small affair. Claudia had been organised, had arranged everything before her mind started to fail, tried to shift the weight of the affair off her family for when she was gone.

The day feels decidedly too sunny for such a morbid occasion.

Stiles’ mother is dead and still the sun feels reason to shine.

Claudia lost most of her friends after the dementia had started to set in. Really the only people she spoke with had been her family and Melissa. The attendance is small. The Stilinskis. The McCalls (minus Scott’s dad, who had been invited but never showed up). A few officers from the station. Some of his mother’s old piano students.

It takes a death for Stiles to meet his grandmother.

Kazimiera Gomolka is small, much smaller than he had expected. In fact they’re almost the same height. The wrinkles in her face are deep; her age carved into her skin in a way that makes her look permanently solemn, as though prepared for sadness and tragedy. She has lost her husband and now her only child as well.

She speaks very little English and, unfortunately, Stiles speaks very little Polish. Their conversation is brief, but there is a fondness in her eyes he hadn’t been expecting.

There are two others he meets for the first time that day.

Madeleine and Sophie lie side by side, tiny plots next to the hole they had to dig for his mother. Their names are also carved into the large marble headstone, a family grave.

He and Noah stay long after the ceremony closes out. Scott tries to catch his eye as Melissa steers him away, tries to send some kind of reassurance over to the boy with a look, but his friend’s gaze is fixed on the sleek black coffin in which his mother rests and he does not see the small kindness.

He feels numb. Like the grief can’t seem to take a hold of his body, sliding off his frame and pooling at his feet. He knows it is there, can feel it trying to sink its teeth in like a venomous snake, but nothing penetrates his skin. He wants to cry. Wants to scream. Anything to show that he cared, that he loved her and he misses her, but nothing comes.

Eventually he’s forced to leave. The hole needs to be filled and Noah wants nothing more than to rest. To sleep and drink and wake up tomorrow and not have to think about anything.

The day after the funeral Noah goes back to work. He has a few vacation days saved up, he could use them for his grieving, probably should, but he can’t let his mind rest. Can’t let it wander. Not when everything at home still looks like Claudia.

Melissa offers to look after Stiles for a while and he gratefully accepts. Her shift doesn’t end until midday and so Stiles has a few hours home alone with his thoughts.

The house is quiet. He should be used to that, really, but it feels different now. There is no one here. No one but Stiles himself. His mother is dead and his father won’t stop drinking, he drinks and drinks and drinks and Stiles just wishes he would stop. Would slow down and look at him. Talk to him. Anything.

He doesn’t know what draws him there, doesn’t know if anything does at all, but he finds himself standing in his mother’s piano room without any memory of having made his way through the house. The room looks untouched, small pockets of dust gather along the surface of the piano, the chest of sheet music. It smells musty and cold, untouched by sunlight in several years, Claudia having sewn the blinds shut in a fit of paranoia at some unknown point of her isolation here.

It looks so much like her. Not the Claudia who had loved piano, not the loving and kind woman Stiles struggles to remember, but the husk of the woman she was before she died. Frail and empty and wrong.

Stiles’ fingers glide across the keys, pressing down in a discordant melody that hardly reaches his ears at all. This wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. His parents were good people and they didn’t deserve this, he didn’t deserve this.

There is a vase sitting atop a set of drawers. There are no flowers in it, the blue china is thick with dust and mould grows on the lip of it, sickly green and furred to the touch.

It’s heavy in Stiles’ hands, heavier than he had expected. He looks at it. Looks around himself at all of the furniture in the room, all of his mother’s things. They sit looking at him, taunting him. They tell him his mother is gone.

Without any warning a volcano of anger erupts inside him. How ¬dare the world take his mother from him. How dare his father ignore him. How dare he be left alone like this.

The sudden rage is blinding, a white hot fury that physically hurts as it boils inside him. His whole body shakes with the feeling of it, quaking in the onslaught of his emotion.

He’s not thinking when he does it, maybe if he had been even a fraction calmer he wouldn’t have gone through with it at all, but he’s angry and hurt and he feels like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t let out some kind of emotion.

Not even pausing to let the thought process he throws the vase against the wall. The glass shatters, raining down onto the carpet in millions of tiny blue pieces. There is a dent in the wall, a marring of the stale perfection of the room and the cracking of the plaster knocks something loose inside the boy. A wrath he didn’t known he possessed boiling under his skin.

He picks up an empty glass and throws that too at the wall. Shards of glass floating down like snow. He tosses framed photographs around the room, watches his mother’s smiling face disappear behind the white stress of fractures. Lifts the stool his mother would sit on as he played and tosses it as violently as his young arms can. When the furniture becomes too solid and too large to destroy with his hands alone he retrieves his lacrosse stick, swinging it around in wild annihilation.

At some point he must have started screaming; his throat raw and painful under the onslaught of sound, so loud he can’t hear himself think. Can process nothing but his need to destroy, to disfigure this room and everything in it. Everything that looks like her.

When he is done he looks around at his handiwork, breathing hard with exertion. The coffee table is shattered into pieces beyond counting. Every wooden leg broken, the small couch and its cushions ripped to shreds, hunks of stuffing strewn across the floor along with the remains of a decorative tea set, flung from its perch and broken to almost unrecognisable bits. So too were the lamps, and the short bookcase under the front window, every book and music sheet once residing within it torn from cover to cover. Even the soft blue wallpaper had been ripped away in dirty, uneven strips, revealing the ugly plaster beneath.

The only thing left standing was the piano, though its sleek black exterior has cracked and worn after the hailstorm of debris that had flown through the room.

Looking down at his hands he finds them scratched and bleeding, fingernails torn and ragged, aching with the labour of his rampage. “Oh,” he whispers into the air, voice cracked and sore, too loud in the sudden stillness of the house.

When Melissa arrives not an hour later she finds Stiles sitting, small and quiet, on the floor in the hallway. She smiles warmly at him. Eyes crinkling in the same way Scott’s do when he’s happy. Then she sees his hands, raw and bleeding. Tears staining his cheeks where he cries quietly. Cradling his injuries gingerly.

She sees the piano room.

Holding the boy in her arms she calls his father home immediately, voice stern and hard enough to cut through steel, a tone Noah knows not to argue with. He doesn’t know what has happened until he arrives to see the mess personally; Stiles’ hands now neatly bandaged, head down.

His son will not look at him.

“Stiles,” he says, the name coming out more of a whisper than anything else, “What happened?”

The boy does not answer, just sits in solemn silence as he stares at his shoes, unable to look his father in the eye.

Melissa steps forward, gesturing them out into the hallway, “Can I speak to you for a moment Noah.”

It is not a question but he nods anyway, walking in a numb trance to follow the young woman.

As soon as they’re out of both sight and earshot she smacks him on the arm, hard. She is deceptively strong for such a small woman and Noah startles at the contact. “What the hell was that for?”

“That was for leaving your son home alone after his mother died,” she says, her words colder than anything he can remember passing her lips. It stops him in his tracks, a pool of something nauseating taking root in his stomach. “This doesn’t come out of nowhere Noah, this builds. There would have been signs. He didn’t just wake up this morning and decide to destroy Claudia’s things, he’s lashing out and afraid and you’ve been ignoring him.”

“I haven’t-“

“Yes. You have.” Melissa sighs, rubbing at her temples trying to ward off the incoming headache. “When was the last time you had a real conversation with your son? I’m not talking about a quick ‘how was your day’, I mean really talked to him. Asked how he was coping.”

Noah opens his mouth to respond, seems so sure that it couldn’t have been that long ago. Only he can’t recall any kind of conversation since Claudia’s death, even worse he can’t recall one for months beforehand either. His face pales, jaw clicking shut, and that’s all the answer that’s needed.

“Things can’t continue like this Noah. I understand you’re grieving, I understand you’re upset, but so is he. Your son has just lost his mother and he needs you to reassure him that things are going to be okay.”

“But I can’t promise him that!”

The outburst is too loud amidst the whispered hush of their conversation. Bounces off the walls of the hallway like someone has hit repeat on a recording. The despair of it an echo that rings in their ears.

“I can’t promise him that,” he says again, sounding as broken. Like all the anguish has caught up to him at once. All those weeks and months and years of losing his wife. So slowly. Slowly enough that he can’t even pinpoint when it really happened. Because the woman who had kicked and screamed and bit in the hospital room not five days ago had not been anyone he knew. And she certainly hadn’t been his wife. “Claudia was- She always knew what to do. She just got hooked on a thing and went for it. I don’t- I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing without her.”

He's crying, he realises, feels his face crack under the soft scrutiny of Melissa’s gaze. Because she is all wide brown eyes and quiet affection and she looks at him with such a deep knowing he feels stripped down to no more than muscle and bone. Feels like one big nerve ending exposed to too much. And she presses a gentle hand to his arm, steadies him as he sobs. Offers up this one small thing to Noah even knowing that it will not be enough.

But it is something.

Instead of cleaning out the piano room Noah shuts it away. There is just so much, and all of it feels so painfully like Claudia, and he can’t. Not now. And maybe not ever. But for now he can forget, as much as possible.

The piano room becomes an unspoken thing. A few times, in the weeks and months afterwards, they try to open the door out of habit. Out of grief. But the lock holds. And the room sits. Empty and aching and angry.

The rooms sits. And it screams. And they cover their ears so they won’t have to hear it.

Noah stops drinking so much. Things are strange between he and Stiles. There is a chasm between them pulled wide with Claudia’s death. But they talk. Really talk. And Noah doesn’t drink and Stiles sleeps through the night (mostly) and they exist. And it’s more than they have been able to do in a long time.

Sometimes, in quiet moments, Stiles feels so angry he might just pull apart at the seams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Sharp decline in Claudia's physical and mental health, violence against a child, abuse of prescription medications and character death.
> 
> Next chapter features everyone's favourite werewolf; Derek! Get hyped.

**Author's Note:**

> TW: miscarriages, alcoholism and Claudia's declining health (both physical and mental)
> 
> edit: I full left out the quote at the start, I apologise for my big dumb


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